Yanira Becerra Ortiz

Yanira Bridgman-Becerra (née Becerra-Ortiz) (Santiago de Chile, 1984)

I hold a Bachelor's degree in Hispanic Language and Literature and a Master's in Hispanic Linguistics from the University of Chile. I am currently a doctoral candidate in Education at the University of Exeter, supported by a scholarship from the Chilean National Research Agency (ANID). My research focuses on the use of metadiscourse in postgraduate academic writing, particularly how it relates to perceptions of writing quality.

For over 16 years, I have worked in higher education, teaching academic writing and Spanish as a foreign language at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels in public and private universities across Chile. I have a long-standing interest in lexicography, which began with my undergraduate thesis and led to a scholarship from Fundación Carolina to study at the Escuela de Lexicografía Hispánica of the Real Academia Española in Madrid. I later collaborated with the Academia Chilena de la Lengua on the Diccionario Fraseológico del Español de Chile (Difruech).

Alongside my academic work, I have recently expanded my interest in digital tools for research and teaching. I work with programming languages such as Python and SPSS for quantitative data analysis, and I use qualitative research software such as NVivo to support my studies in discourse and education.